Before I get into the results, let's talk about how farming should be properly measured.

Farming consists of two essential types of events. One of these is DPSing, the act of actually attacking monsters to make them drop loot. The other, far broader category, we'll label downtime, a blanket term to cover anything that isn't DPSing. Running from a dead monster pack to a living one, kiting (maneuvering around living monsters for survivability purposes), deaths, recharging (waiting for cooldowns to reset or resources to regenerate), selling items to merchants, stash dumps, and even putting found items up for auction are all considered downtime. However, only serious time counts; inefficiency caused by not really playing the game with your full attention does not count towards this definition of downtime.

Unfortunately, the line between downtime and DPSing isn't quite that clear-cut. Killing white mobs doesn't have the same magic find potential as killing elites, and the time spent DPSing before achieving 5-stack valor is not as farming-effective as time spent on 5-stack. For the moment, we will assume that such activities count as partial downtime; finding the exact coefficient would be a subject for later inquiry.

The interesting thing about the Monster Power system is that many of these variables remain at least somewhat constant. The premise of all of the following math is: downtime remains constant moving from one monster level to another. In regards to time spent moving from one mob to another and time in town, this is a pretty safe assumption; in terms of kiting, deaths, and recharging, it's a much less safe assumption. However, most skilled farmers take care to avoid exactly these forms of preventable downtime, by over-gearing for content and maximizing resource regeneration/sustainability.

1-2. No Such Thing as Half a MP Level

Due to the integral nature of MP levels, finding breakpoints is the practical application; in order to find the breakpoint of an inequality, we need merely find the point where they are equal. A quick glance at the MP chart shows the monster health outpaces increased magic find, even at MP1. Therefore, only downtime can make a higher MP level more attractive. However, as DPS increases, DPSing time naturally goes down, increasing the relative amount of downtime in a given farming run. So what we need to find is a measure of downtime.

Remembering that downtime is a constant, eliminating other constants such as DPS*, and setting F[SUB]1 [/SUB]to the lower MP level, we get:

Calculating the exact amount in seconds is too obsessive for the layperson, so what we want instead is a ratio of DPSing to downtime. In other words, if I ask you right now how many seconds you have of downtime per run, you probably wouldn't have an answer, but if I ask you whether your downtime is greater or less than 50%, you could probably tell me. Framing this downtime as a percentage of overall farming-run time for the lower MP level gives us:

The TL;DR is: MP0 for Act 3, and MP1 for Acts 1 and 2, are awesome. Everything else pretty much sucks.

However, for you nitpickers out there, this is where the unclear definition of downtime becomes somewhat important.

For gold-finding, I think everyone agrees that killing whites is beneficial, and therefore it's almost impossible to graduate up to higher MPs while maintaining efficiency.

For loot-finding, auction house actions and the possible downtime aspect of killing whites (or if you don't kill whites, moving from one elite pack to another) enter the picture. Even then, it can very difficult for a serious farmer to graduate to a higher MP level while maintaining efficiency. For example, if you go on a 19-minute run killing 17 elites, finding one AH-worthy item which takes you 1 minute to list afterwards, your elite battles averaged a mere 20 seconds each, and you don't count whites or the elites you downed to get 5 stacks of NV (not even partially!), you still only have 80% downtime, which means you are staying at MP1 unless you have near-zero MF from gear or Paragon levels. Even if you're the most godly DPSer on your server, I can't imagine anyone who's ideal farming MP level is higher than 4; for 99% of the population, it's 0 or 1... as the TL;DR said.

2-3. Keyfinding chart

As a reminder, breakpoint values are the minimum percent of downtime per farming run at the listed MP level before graduating to the next MP level.

Code:

MP %DT
3 17.0
4 37.2
5 50.1
6 58.3
7 64.3
8 68.8
9 72.2

2.4 Keyfinding conclusions

You might notice there are no entries for levels 0, 1 and 2. That's because the value is negative; if your downtime is zero or greater, increasing MP level benefits you! MP3 is the minimum MP level that anyone seriously farming keys should consider; for virtually every keyfarmer, MP5 is a much better goal to aim for.

Keyfinding also scales much better with increased MP level than MF and GF, although at the high MP levels it still likely becomes inefficient. However, 60% downtime isn't really that hard to imagine, especially since whites do absolutely nothing in the keyfinding process and should rightly be treated as a waste during downtime computations. Therefore, MP8 keyfarming runs aren't necessarily an undertaking reserved solely for the insane.

If you have a very powerful character capable of easily handling the higher MP levels, this is an area where you actually enjoy a competitive advantage over other farmers... as opposed to, say, trying to out-farm Legendaries against a Tactical-Advantage spamming demon hunter with low defenses who runs MP1 Act1 over and over again. Very many characters can farm items efficiently; very few can farm keys well. As such, high-powered characters who aren't keyfarming are pretty much doing it wrong.

* Very nitpicky math note:

Upon eliminating DPS as a constant, w is no longer downtime in seconds, but downtime expressed as health. At first it seems weird, as if you're DPSing your stash when you're dumping into it, or DPSing the ground as you move. However, if you think of it from an economics opportunity-cost sort of angle, that is exactly what you're doing, and I wanted to eliminate the DPS constant as soon as possible to avoid rewriting it numerous times.

Interesting analysis, and it essentially matches my qualitative experience. Farming MP0 act 3 is by far the fastest way to get rares/legendaries, and farming the highest MP level you can reasonably manage is the best way to get keys.

Of course if you're looking for both the analysis becomes more complicated. I include a key boss in any of my farming runs, because why wouldn't you? At that point you have to choose how much you want to weight keys against regular loots before you can make a reasonable choice. However, if you can increase MP level without much decrease in downtime (by your metric, by a more typical metric, without much increase in run length) then it makes sense to do so.

Edit: you also don't seem to have accounted for the guaranteed yellow drop from elite packs, which further skews things in favor of MP0, although not by much, since 4 stat yellows are rarely worth anything.

The thing is, if you only care about legendaries and keys, and can have a lot less downtime by skipping normal monsters, but lose a lot of XP in the process. Since most people care about all of them, and most would have very different MP levels for maximum efficiency for all of them, it starts to get really complicated. Only if you're high enough level to not care so much about XP does it get easier.

To make things more complicated, if you're a sprint barb, skipping and killing takes about the same time if you're playing on low monster power, but killing would take much longer on high monster power (therefore, if you do want to kill, you need to keep monster power lowers even if you want to have a strong emphasis on keys).

In the end, we all care about everything, but I agree with the general concept of the analysis, and actually use a spreadsheet that takes into account your paragon level and downtime to give you the relative efficiency of XP, MF and key finding for all MP levels.

Interesting analysis, and it essentially matches my qualitative experience. Farming MP0 act 3 is by far the fastest way to get rares/legendaries, and farming the highest MP level you can reasonably manage is the best way to get keys.

Of course if you're looking for both the analysis becomes more complicated. I include a key boss in any of my farming runs, because why wouldn't you? At that point you have to choose how much you want to weight keys against regular loots before you can make a reasonable choice. However, if you can increase MP level without much decrease in downtime (by your metric, by a more typical metric, without much increase in run length) then it makes sense to do so.

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Ideally, Hellfire Ring market prices would reflect how, generally speaking, you need much better gear to farm for the ring properly. However, it's more likely that it won't be that simple. Nevertheless, and especially during this early part where Hellfire demand will be high, you should probably prioritize that. Later, it will be a function of relative market value, which someone else can do the formulas for. (Quantifying the profit per MF run for normal loot is very hard; however, quantifying the effort to create a Hellfire is actually pretty easy.)

you also don't seem to have accounted for the guaranteed yellow drop from elite packs, which further skews things in favor of MP0, although not by much, since 4 stat yellows are rarely worth anything.

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Slightly misleading: I mentioned it as effecting downtime, and said it's a topic for later research. However, as galzohar says, there are lots of angles to this view of downtime, more than I covered, and the topic is actually pretty complex. The point is that now we have an objective standard for when to move from one MP to another, based upon single goals. Averaging efficiency as well as goals together is just some additional work.

Excellent analysis; I like to see this kind of thing. Much like magicrectangle, it fits my experience too. I do end up running a higher Monster Power than theoretically optimal, as I just can't bring myself to give up the 20% move speed and dps of WotB. If monsters' hp is too low, I can't sustain it in 1.0.5 even with a mighty weapon, 48% crit chance, and Boon of Bul Kathos. I guess that's where math meets reality for me; the fun factor. XD

Hellfire rings are account-bound, though. On the other hand, they can easily roll stats that make them worth many hours of normal farming, so you have to take that into account too.

Ideally, Hellfire Ring market prices would reflect how, generally speaking, you need much better gear to farm for the ring properly. However, it's more likely that it won't be that simple. Nevertheless, and especially during this early part where Hellfire demand will be high, you should probably prioritize that. Later, it will be a function of relative market value, which someone else can do the formulas for. (Quantifying the profit per MF run for normal loot is very hard; however, quantifying the effort to create a Hellfire is actually pretty easy.)

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As Karth says, Hellfire rings are account bound, so assigning them a market value would be rather difficult.

The WotB issue isn't just about fun factor. Being able to keep WotB up increases DPS, and reduces travel time. It makes sense for you to make a more empirical (rather than theoretical) analysis. Simply time your run a few times on each MP level (5 times would be good, but 3 times is probably more practical, 5 is a lot of runs for each MP level). Divide the average run length for a given MP level by 1+MF (total MF expressed as decimal, not percent, including MF from gear, paragon, valor, and MP level), and whichever number comes out the lowest, that's the MP level you should be doing, from a loot perspective.

For an even more accurate number, rather than use 0.75% for the valor MF contribution, calculate the exact contribution (for elite drops anyway):

Note that the guaranteed extra drop has been ignored. In order to include it, we would need to know what percentage of loot we expect to get from trash mobs as opposed to elites. The contribution would tend to be small, so I'll just leave it ignored for now.

For keys, time the run just the same, but divide by key drop chance: 0.05 for MP0, 0.1*MPlevel for the other MP levels.

The (partially) experimental approach, while it doesn't offer the ability to generalize to any player as easily, takes into account all variables such as WotB uptime, and other things more specific to your class/build/playstyle.

Excellent analysis; I like to see this kind of thing. Much like magicrectangle, it fits my experience too. I do end up running a higher Monster Power than theoretically optimal, as I just can't bring myself to give up the 20% move speed and dps of WotB. If monsters' hp is too low, I can't sustain it in 1.0.5 even with a mighty weapon, 48% crit chance, and Boon of Bul Kathos. I guess that's where math meets reality for me; the fun factor. XD

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Thanks. And keeping WotB up impacts your downtime (specifically time spent running from one mob to another)... it destroys the key assumption that downtime remains constant. My belief was that downtime defaults to remaining constant, but numerous modifiers (WotB among them) have an impact. Quantifying each type of modifier, although difficult, is something I think is possible. I think in the case of WotB we could find a breakpoint for (time DPSing)/(downtime) such that, if over that amount, both DPSing time and downtime are reduced by their own modifiers (corresponding to attack speed and movement speed increases).

Even with all that WotB excitement, in the end testing for 1 hour doing alkaizer runs, I earned 25% more exp/hour at MP0 than MP4. And it's not a gear issue, as at MP4 I died once in an entire hour (to a lunatic ambush), and I kill everything extremely fast (a quick pass through is enough if they take enough ticks from tornadoes, though a rend needs to be added to kill the bigger stuff or the runners in 1 sweep). Even with more WotB uptime at MP4, everything dying instantly at MP0 just can't be matched.

I still need to test MP1~3, and I do believe I played a bit worse (made more mistakes) while doing the MP4 testing session, but still I doubt I can get more exp/hour at MP4 than I can get at MP0.

As for MF, with my gear I estimated (trying to take into account the extra drop chance that doesn't work on guaranteed elite drops using some relatively old statistics) it to scale about the same as XP does (1.3X XP and loot per kill/run at MP4 compared to MP0), so I would also get more loot/hour (or shall I say legendaries/hour, as those are the grand majority of anyone's income nowadays and even were so back in 1.0.4).

In the end, I think it would be best to just count xp/hour, figure out the increased run time and compare it to the increase (or decrease) in loot/hour or keys/hour. But that still doesn't account for runs where you skip normal monsters to maximize your loot/hour and keys/hour at the expense of a lot of xp/hour. To do that you need to count elites/hour or keys/hour to get a reasonable idea of whether or not you are gaining from running at higher MP. Of course to get meaningful results you need to do a lot more than "just 1 hour" sample size that I did, and run each MP level for at least a few hours. If anyone can get more XP/hour in MP1 over MP0 using a sprint/whirlwind barb testing 5 hours in each MP setting then I can start thinking more seriously about farming higher MP For anything other than keys.

Even with all that WotB excitement, in the end testing for 1 hour doing alkaizer runs, I earned 25% more exp/hour at MP0 than MP4.

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Thanks for the testing to confirm the theorycraft, although XP does have significantly different metrics.

If F[SUB]0[/SUB]/F[SUB]4[/SUB]=1.25 and we assume 5-stack Valor is up continuously (obviously it's not, but we're simplifying here), then 1.25=[(x[SUB]0[/SUB]+75)/(100+w)]/[(x[SUB]0[/SUB]+45+75)/(457+w)]. Solving for w yields w=(1328*x+77100)/(x+300). If you have a radstar ruby socketed in your helm, w is about 582.5 (as a raw score), which would put your approximate downtimes as follows:

Code:

MP DT%
0 85.3%
1 81.6%
2 78.5%
3 75.4%
4 72.6%

I don't know your MF from gear+paragon, so I can't determine which of those MP levels is best for you in terms of legendary hunting. If it's maxed out, you want to stay in MP0 (counterintuitively, the more paragon levels you gain, the more attractive MP0 becomes for loot).

This math does not compute for WW barbs, since now its much harder to sustain zerk the best way to find loot is the MPL where the health of the monsters enables you to keep zerk almost all time but at the same it must be the lowest possible MPL so u can kill monsters the fastest possible.

Look at my case for instance, i just cannot keep zerk on mpl 0-2, on 3 i strugle a little so i farm on MPL 4. Zerk not only increases your dps, but the best bennefit of it is that it reduces your downtime IMMENSELLY. It reduces kiting, it gives you insane speed and insane dps. So ... for barbs just keep that in mind when farming.

I understand your math only partially. Could you care to explain it with an example, where you explain how the farm run length plays into this. Some players pick up all rares and some only ring/amulet. Also adding +25% MF doesnt do much, if you have allready like 250-300 MF with 5xNV, PL and Gear. The graph for MF isnt linear, correct ?
Did you measure in the bonus item drop chance for increasing MPL ?

I am a low geared DH right now and i dont see this getting anywhere effective to change from Act3 MP0 to MP1 or Act1/2 MP1 to MP2. I would really need very high dps to make it worth for just one MPL more.

This math does not compute for WW barbs, since now its much harder to sustain zerk the best way to find loot is the MPL where the health of the monsters enables you to keep zerk almost all time but at the same it must be the lowest possible MPL so u can kill monsters the fastest possible.

Look at my case for instance, i just cannot keep zerk on mpl 0-2, on 3 i strugle a little so i farm on MPL 4. Zerk not only increases your dps, but the best bennefit of it is that it reduces your downtime IMMENSELLY. It reduces kiting, it gives you insane speed and insane dps. So ... for barbs just keep that in mind when farming.

Click to expand...

maybe thats why this is for MOST characters and not all dude.. god damn.. read more please...

As far as I can tell the "bonus rare" is really a "bonus item" if you discount 4-affix rares. So it's another item that might roll legendary or 6-affix. Therefore, at 5 stacks, other than the MF, you also get 3 guaranteed items from an elite pack rather than just 2 (anything more than that, though, is "normal" monster drops and has nothing to do with it being an elite pack, again as far as I understand). This makes 5 valor buffs quite a bit more important for MF than they are for XP.

Regarding keeping berserker up, like I said the XP/hour loss is simply there, and the WotB uptime, in practice, was not enough to make up for it.

As for loot/hour rather than xp/hour, I found that I get a lot more elites/hour doing act 2 MP1 VoA+mines+arcarnus (no other zones in the game can really come close). There, the average time between elites in ~30 seconds. Time to kill an elite is very hard to measure and every small difference can have a huge effect on the optimal monster power level. Trying to estimate it, I was getting that I would receive 6% more loot/hour if I run MP4, which is nothing.

I don't know if I agree with the logic behind this guide. If your downtime is considered constant, so running from point A to point B and vendoring takes just as long on MP10 as MP0, when you up the MP to the highest level at which you're not concerned with dying you just spend more time in combat. Ratio uptime/downtime gets bigger?

What happens when you're just blowing things up seamlessly at MP0? Say you're a DH, you're above paragon 70, you're ignoring white mobs that die in your wake of spike traps and trail of cinders, and elite packs go down within 5 seconds to a few bolas and a rain of vengance. At MP3 maybe the elite packs take 7 seconds total. How can you argue that a lower MP is still correct?

If an elite pack at MP0 takes 5 seconds on average, unless your average elite kill includes massive overkill, it should take a lot more than 7 seconds on MP3. More like 16.3 seconds, minus any overkill savings (which is at most 1 shot, so let's call it 15 seconds minimum). If run time between elites is 30 seconds (which is pretty damn fast, VoA-like, hard to get close to this number anywhere else in the game), you are taking 28.5% longer. At paragon 76 you get about 22.6% more loot (doing some guesstimations regarding the value of the "extra item chance when you get a non-guaranteed item drop, in practice may be more or less, probably less), so you are actually farming slower at MP3. For MP3 to be worth it you need elites killed in more like 3 seconds, at least at my paragon level 76 and taking 30 seconds on average between elite packs.

That said, when it comes to MF DHs might actually start to have an advantage over barbs at high gear levels, as they can just vault everywhere faster than a barb can sprint and only have to stop for elites, as long as you have the discipline for it and the survivability to not need the discipline for skills other than vault. Of course, cutting down time between elites lower than 30 seconds only makes it even better to stick with MP0/1.

The idea is that you find an elite pack, blow your major cooldown skill, and take the necessary few seconds to read what drops and pick it up. Not exactly a static "downtime", but a similar concept. It's a minimum amount of time spent per elite pack. Increasing the MP level enough to go from complete overkill on the pack to requiring a few seconds of clean up shots after the minimum time may not even double the amount of total time spent on the pack.

Another factor to consider here is that white mobs become more valuable relative to elite packs at higher MP. Once you get to 5 NV at MP8-10 it feels like the elite packs are just there to slow you down between big packs of whites.

This math does not compute for WW barbs, since now its much harder to sustain zerk the best way to find loot is the MPL where the health of the monsters enables you to keep zerk almost all time but at the same it must be the lowest possible MPL so u can kill monsters the fastest possible.

Look at my case for instance, i just cannot keep zerk on mpl 0-2, on 3 i strugle a little so i farm on MPL 4. Zerk not only increases your dps, but the best bennefit of it is that it reduces your downtime IMMENSELLY. It reduces kiting, it gives you insane speed and insane dps. So ... for barbs just keep that in mind when farming.

Click to expand...

What we have here is square peg in round hole syndrome. Assuming 300 MF from gear/paragon and 5-stack Valor, going from MP1 to MP2 is an effective increase of... 5% magic find (25/500). So really it's about doing the same thing but now faster because of Thrive. If one MP level keeps Thrive up, I can actually see this working; you get up to 16% more effective move speed (1.44/1.24, assuming a legendary for 24% move and saving Sprint for battles), and although Thrive probably won't quite give 40-50% DPS, it should provide enough where, combined with the Thrive move bonus, you accomplish the same run faster or just as fast. However, going up 2 or more MP levels for Thrive is just... rediculous.

If I had some kind of brain aneurysm and decided to build a Thrive barb for MF runs (and didn't predict a 1.06 revision to the MP system), I'd try to solve the problem somewhat by leaning heavily on the "damage vs elites" mod. Stone of Jordan? You betcha. Gearing to get 50% or so damage vs elites would probably heavily weaken your damage against white mobs... but that is, in its entirety, your justification for a higher MP level. Your complaint, literally, is "but I kill them too fast!"

Do you understand how counter-intuitive that is?

I'm not mocking the power of the traditional Run Like the Wind playstyle when it comes to keyfarming; it's awesome for that. But all your frustration comes from sticking to the "infinite WotB" model despite a page of math that says it isn't going to work. My serious suggestion: accept that Thrive won't be up at all times.

I'm not suggesting dropping Thrive. Actually, for a MP0/1 MF barb, some form of Sprint and WotB are pretty much mandatory for the movespeed bonuses alone, and you really only get 4 skill choices (other than rune selection). Furthermore, Thrive is a decent rune because it lasts longer than the others (even if only by a couple of seconds). I'm just saying you need to get over the fact that it will be down sometimes when farming MP0/1, and that some other runes might begin to look more attractive (Insanity?).

I understand your math only partially. Could you care to explain it with an example, where you explain how the farm run length plays into this.

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That's very labor-intensive, and I've been jammed lately (obviously not when i wrote this)... but it probably would be demonstrative. When I wrote the initial post I was originally going to break down a YouTube video of an Archon wizard doing a Act3 MP4 run to show how much time was actually spent DPSing as opposed to downtiming. Maybe at some point I'll get back around to it. No promises.

That said, when it comes to MF DHs might actually start to have an advantage over barbs at high gear levels, as they can just vault everywhere faster than a barb can sprint and only have to stop for elites, as long as you have the discipline for it and the survivability to not need the discipline for skills other than vault. Of course, cutting down time between elites lower than 30 seconds only makes it even better to stick with MP0/1.

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I play a DH, and the reason I switched to it (after some casual time with other classes when the game first came out) is that I figured the DH would have to be the best ultra-late-game farmer simply because it has the best movement options; I figured with good enough gear you'd have insane DPS, and with insane DPS your choice of attack skill wouldn't matter. Having played a lot since, I can say I was wrong about that; spamming Multishot is absurdly efficient at killing things at low MP levels, while it gets noticeably worse at higher MP levels where you're bound to run into Hatred problems attempting the build.

The idea is that you find an elite pack, blow your major cooldown skill, and take the necessary few seconds to read what drops and pick it up. Not exactly a static "downtime", but a similar concept. It's a minimum amount of time spent per elite pack. Increasing the MP level enough to go from complete overkill on the pack to requiring a few seconds of clean up shots after the minimum time may not even double the amount of total time spent on the pack.

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At MP0, you don't really need to blow defensive cooldowns for elites, except perhaps to break a CC effect.

Another factor to consider here is that white mobs become more valuable relative to elite packs at higher MP. Once you get to 5 NV at MP8-10 it feels like the elite packs are just there to slow you down between big packs of whites.

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Let's say that white mobs on MP0 drop gear (not gold or potions or gems) 10% of the time. At MP10, that goes from 10% to 110% (yes, they can double-drop), which is a 1100% relative increase... and in exchange you get a 3439% increase in monster health. After factoring in the increased magic find as well, you should end up getting about 1678% the MP0 amount of loot from whites. That's a huge increase on what, in my experience, is a hugely inefficient source for MFing on MP0; however, there's nothing like a x16 multiplier to transform inefficient into amazing. I might begin recording how many rares I get from white mobs as opposed to elites over a series of Alkaizer runs on MP0, then (assuming number of rares dropped is proportional to number of legendaries dropped) factor the increased drop chance into my calculations. Out of all the things that bothers me about my math, this is top of the list. However, I have trouble believing that whites would ever farm better than elites, even on MP10 or some such craziness; I'd just be doing it for thoroughness. Again, if/when I have time, no promises.